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I found out this week that MasterChef judge Gregg Wallace has got married for the fourth time. I hadn’t previously realised he was a serial husband. Prior to this, I’ve known Wallace only for his cheeky-chappy television persona (Dick van Dyke crossed with the perpetually cheerful man who hands out free copies of NME) and his borderline-inappropriate love of puddings.

On the show, he often proclaims he wants to “bury his face” in an oozing hot chocolate fondant or a wobbly vanilla panna cotta, and he says this with such unmitigated fervour you start to wonder what happens to the desserts after filming and whether they mysteriously disappear to his dressing room to be fondled.

I went to reply, and looked at her photo and thought: ‘Oh my word. You’re a pretty girl…’

But this week, Gregg did an interview with daytime television poppet Lorraine Kelly, and I learned that he had once again tied the knot – this time with a woman 21 years his junior. I’ve got no problem with the age thing. They’re both consenting adults (unlike the puddings), and age is but a number and all that.

What I am mildly concerned about is the fact he met his wife, Anne-Marie, on Twitter.

“I did a programme cooking with duck and rhubarb, and she sent a message saying: ‘Does that really work?’” Gregg told Lorraine, proving once and for all that modern romance is not dead. “I went to reply, and looked at her photo and thought: ‘Oh my word. You’re a pretty girl…’”

Secondly: the fact that Wallace still uses phrases such as “Oh my word” and refers to grown women as “girls” suggests he probably doesn’t know how Twitter actually works. He probably calls it “the Twitter” and uses a dial-up internet connection.

Anyway, Wallace and Anne-Marie exchanged a few private messages, and then he sent her his phone number (was it a landline, Gregg?), and that was five years ago, and now they’re married.

I’m not sure Twitter is the perfect place to make a lasting spousal connection

I wish them the very best. But I’m not sure Twitter is the perfect place to make a lasting spousal connection, especially given that Wallace also met his third wife, Heidi, on the same social network. On that occasion, he posted a joke about “jiggling cabbage”, and Heidi saucily replied with a question about celery. They met. Fell in love. Tied the knot. Got divorced after 14 months.

History does not record where Wallace met his second wife, Denise, whom he married in 1999, or his first, Christine, whom he married in 1991 and divorced the same year, but Twitter wasn’t invented then so his preferred option wasn’t available to him.

On social media, we create an alternative persona. We use carefully filtered profile images that show us at our best angle. We choose how our life is portrayed, selecting only the most glamorous or picturesque moments to share. If we want, we can remain anonymous: Twitter still enables anyone to post without revealing their real name and to hide behind the default avatar of a faceless white egg.

At best, this means we’re all kidding ourselves about how fabulous we are. On Instagram, the woman you know vaguely from the canteen at work suddenly mutates into a lean-limbed fitness fanatic who posts images of herself in a bikini executing effortless yoga poses on the beach. On Facebook, you discover that all your friends seem to have the best, most beautiful children who say the funniest, most precocious things. On Twitter, you kid yourself that the twentysomething whose photo you liked is destined to be your wife.

There’s a darker side, too. In creating alternate personalities, we create more extreme versions of ourselves. We can type whatever we want from behind the relative safety of a computer screen. That makes the internet fertile ground for abuse. On Twitter, people say things they would probably think twice about shouting to someone in the street because there is no immediate human reaction to make you feel bad.